Strengthening communities for access to health after the Peace Agreement in Colombia
The United Nations Multi-Donor Fund finances the Health for Peace, Strengthening Communities Project and supports the response to COVID-19
The United Nations Multi-Donor Fund for Sustaining Peace in Colombia is a tripartite mechanism composed of the government of Colombia, the United Nations (UN) and international cooperation; its objective is to mobilize and coordinate financial interventions to support peace in Colombia.
This includes the Health for Peace, Strengthening Communities Project, in which the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) and the International Organization for Migration, the United Nations Population Fund, and the Ministry of Health of Colombia are participants.
In 2017 PAHO, together with the other UN agencies in Colombia, signed the framework agreement with the government of Colombia for establishing the Multi-Donor Fund.
The Multi-Donor Fund makes crucial interventions and investments when no other resources are available; to enable essential peacebuilding processes; and to support innovative or high-risk approaches. Almost 20 bilateral or multilateral organizations contribute to its financing. Germany, Norway and the United Kingdom are among its largest contributors.
Support of the Multi-Donor Fund has also been key in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly in working to improve access to quality health services in priority areas for the stabilization plans.
Joint work of United Nations agencies in Health for Peace
The Health for Peace, Strengthening Communities Project seeks to develop local institutional capacities to promote and guarantee the right to health and to improve primary health care in prioritized territories in the peace agreements. The project emphasizes areas such as sexual and reproductive health, mental health, attention to childhood and nutritional health, and preventing the use of psychoactive substances.
Through the Multi-Donor Fund, the project has received some $ 8.5 million since November 2017. In the first phase, actions related to health were implemented in 26 municipalities identified as a priority due to the impact that armed conflict had had on the communities. In the second phase, which began in September 2019, these interventions continued, but the Fund's contributions increased to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. These additional resources allowed to extend the geographical scope of the interventions and add a total of 170 municipalities. These municipalities require support for their stabilization and transformation as they were the territories most affected by the armed conflict, with the highest rates of poverty, the presence of illicit economies, and institutional weakness.
The project benefits about 20,000 young people and adolescents, another 20,000 children under the age of five, and about 7,500 children under the age of two who are at risk of malnutrition. It also works with rural hospitals and 19 departmental health secretariats.
With its innovative mechanism that integrates the contributions of dozens of organizations and coordinates support according to national priorities, and with its flexibility to support urgent actions needed to respond to COVID-19, the United Nations Multi-Donor Fund in Colombia is a key partner that helps PAHO fulfill its objective of guaranteeing access to quality health services in the most complex areas of the country.
More information:
United Nations Multi-Donor Fund for the Sustaining of Peace